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Pollster Nik Nanos.The Globe and Mail

Nik Nanos is The Globe and Mail's pollster and chairman of Nanos Research.

Elections can deal out harsh lessons for political parties. On this front, the question remains: What have the federal Tories learned from their most recent defeat?

Currently, the federal Liberals are flying high in public opinion, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair will be going through a leadership review, and the Tory numbers pale when compared to those of the Trudeau Liberals. There are a number of trends that should both trouble, and potentially comfort, the federal Conservatives.

First, on the worrying side, fewer Canadians would consider voting for the Conservatives compared to the Liberals. Asked a series of independent questions for each federal party, six of 10 Canadians would consider voting for the Liberals, about 45 per cent would consider voting NDP, and 43 per cent would consider voting Conservative. That's not an insurmountable lead the the Tories must overcome, but they need a strategy to get more voters to consider voting Conservative before even thinking about trying to convert this into support. This is where the leadership race becomes critical for the party.

Two things need to occur for the Conservative rebuilding process. They need to have something new or someone new in the window to appeal to voters who have disconnected from the party. Part of the renewal narrative also has to be that the Conservatives have learned something from their 2015 defeat at the polls. Newness is important for political success.

One could argue that one of the challenges for the Conservatives in the last federal election was that their leader and their government looked tired. Their strategy lacked a spark to engage voters, and they fell into the trap of thinking that what worked in the past should work again. In this day and age, successful parties and politicians need to remake and renew themselves while constantly connecting with voters.

There are the beginnings of a positive glimmer for the Tories on the public opinion front. Their numbers are starting to track ahead in the Prairies in the Nanos Party Power Index, a basket of political factors which includes vote preferences and impressions of the leaders. The Conservatives have not enjoyed an upper hand in the Prairies since last year. In one respect, the rebuilding process for the Tories starts in the Prairies. If they cannot re-energize voters there, it will be a tough sojourn in the political wilderness for the country's Conservative movement.

The winning strategy for any federal party includes having a regional base and then taking the fight to the nation to win a majority. The Liberal base currently is the big cities, Ontario, and the Atlantic. The Conservatives are still competitive outside of the cities but need to rebuild a regional base in the hopes of being able to challenge the Liberals. Right now, their base is weak. The result of the last election, where they garnered about one in three voters, should be cold comfort because part of that vote was ideological, and the other those Canadians who stuck with Stephen Harper through thick and thin.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the last election was that winning parties give voters something that's new. In 2015 it was the newness of style of now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that vaulted the Liberals to a majority government while the Conservatives looked same-old, same-old. The outcome suggests that renewal in the party might be enough to motivate the core, but not enough to win the next election.

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